The New York Times: Sarah Lucas, Unmasked: From Perverse to Profound

Not widely known on this side of the Atlantic, the British sculptor has a show at the New Museum this fall that may cause jaws to drop. Roberta Smith reviews the upcoming solo exhibition.

“A rude woman
is really what we need right now,” a veteran of the New York art scene said to
me last May, just weeks before several assertive female political candidates
started to emerge and even win some primaries.

In this
case, however, the rude woman under discussion was the pre-eminent British
sculptor Sarah Lucas, whose first American museum retrospective —
and largest exhibition of her work yet — will open at the New Museum on Sept.
26. It may cause some art world jaws to drop.

Prolific
and provocative, yet not widely known this side of the Atlantic, Ms. Lucas is
an original member of the Young British Artists (Y.B.A.s), the group Damien Hirst —
while still in art school — introduced in 1988 with the “Freeze” exhibition, helping to rocket the London art scene to
international status. She established herself abruptly in London four years
later with “Penis Nailed to a Board,” her first solo gallery show. The title
came from a work that incorporates a sensational
article — and its headline — from The Sunday Sport, a British tabloid that’s
now defunct.

Over the
years, I don’t think any artist’s work has shocked me — mostly in good ways —
as often as Ms. Lucas’s. Some of her pieces have initially made me wonder if
they are art or some kind of dirty joke. Their unrelentingly challenging
attitude is among their strengths.

Ms. Lucas’s
works tend to be raw, sexually hilarious and heartily skeptical of propriety
and societal repressiveness, especially concerning the body and its basic
impulses. Her blunt yet ambiguous meditations on gender, class and language
make her one of the few great artists to emerge from the Y.B.A. ranks, as the
New Museum’s show, “Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel,” should demonstrate. It will fill most of the
building with over 160 works made since 1989: photographs, photo-based
wallpaper, videos and sculptures, many using her signature combination of
pantyhose stuffed with cotton or wool fluff. Those efforts include floppy
female half-figures from the “Bunny Gets Snookered” series and the abstract, coiled
knots of the strikingly expressive “NUD” pieces, which can suggest entangled
couples, malformed fists or Matisse sculptures.

A
photograph Ms. Lucas staged for this article alludes to these materials: A ball
of white fluff is held atop her head by a bank robber’s mask of pantyhose,
turning her into a kind of Lucas sculpture. Whether intentionally or not, the
image seems to parody the flawless Hollywood studio portraits of yore and also
evokes the “fascinator” hats favored by British upper-class women at royal
weddings.

After
“Freeze,” Ms. Lucas said she wavered in her commitment to making art. “I had no
idea whether I was any good,” she said in June, when she was in New York,
preparing her show. We were chatting in my apartment, over white wine from a
bottle she had brought with her.

She wasn’t
even sure what art was for. She said the issue bothered her quite a bit. Also,
the male Y.B.A.s were getting most of the attention. “I was quite reconciled to
people not being so interested in me, but that freed me up,” she said. “I could
experiment with materials, only pleasing myself.” She came to realize, she
added, that “I could really have a lot of fun, humor, between me and me.”

By 1991,
Ms. Lucas was making big collages from the most offensive Sport spreads. (An
example, “Fat, Forty and Flabulous,” is in the retrospective.) Reading
the feminist Andrea Dworkin helped her “see the extent to which everything is
stacked against women,” she said. Dworkin also wrote about exploitive tabloid
images, which encouraged Ms. Lucas to think she “could mobilize this hateful
stuff to my own purpose,” she added. Part of that purpose was to explore an
unsettling ambiguity: Are such images titillating, offensive, tragic or some
combination thereof? Ms. Lucas feels that the tabloid spreads symbolize the
position of all women, not just those in the images. And more: “You can
identify with men as much as women,” she said. “They coexist.”

Since then,
Ms. Lucas’s art has specialized in rudeness — although unvarnished honesty with
a moral undertone may be more accurate. The phallus — whose depiction in
Western art has been one of the most persistent taboos since the end of the
Classical era — is a ubiquitous form in her work. (You might think that she
wants to equal the attention male artists have lavished upon female breasts throughout
history.) Intercourse is frequently intimated, and a tender sarcasm is the
prevailing tone. Titles can include profanities and other slang learned on the
streets of Islington, the London borough where she grew up. Her materials are
cheap and familiar: old furniture, toilets, cinder blocks, underwear, cans of
Spam and the stuffed pantyhose. Cars, traditionally a male obsession, also
figure in: variously crushed, bisected, burned or carefully collaged with a
layer of cigarettes, as are other objects. Fruits and vegetables, kebabs and
whole raw chickens do double service, portraying erotic body parts.

All of
which may startle Americans, who tend to be more prudish than the British.
Also, while Ms. Lucas’s work has been seen in museums and galleries all over
Europe — and represented Britain at the Venice Art Biennale in 2015 — she has
had only four solo shows in this country, at the Gladstone Gallery in New York,
starting in 1995.

Even if you
know how good Ms. Lucas is as an artist, there’s a chance you don’t know all
the different ways she’s good, how consistently tough her fusion of politics,
aesthetics and the grit of life has been, and how it has deepened over the
years, especially formally. Ms. Lucas speaks of “the necessity of actual
boldness” in art.

“It’s hard
to keep that sense of necessity,” she said. She has succeeded to an unusual
extent, perhaps partly because she has never had a permanent studio, which may
enforce an implicitly improvisatory mode that keeps her work fresh and on edge.

There’s
also the increasing richness with which her art connects to the history of
modern sculpture, beginning with Dada and Surrealism. For starters, her toilets
could be seen as female rejoinders to Duchamp’s urinal, and, of course, her
work is riddled with variations on the ready-made. Magritte, Louise Bourgeois,
Gilbert & George, Martin Kippenberger and especially the sculptor Franz
West are among her influences, as well as the humble materials of Italian Arte
Povera and Post-Minimalism. Her work is dotted with amused asides, including
fluorescent light fixtures — a signature of the Minimalist Dan Flavin — used as
penises.

In
contrast, there are the eggs, those perfect little female miracles, full of
hope — and in Ms. Lucas’s favorite shade of yellow — with which she covered the
interior of the British Pavilion during the 2015 Venice Art Biennale. In her
work, fried eggs function as breasts or eyes; throwing eggs can
half-seriously approach pagan ritual or figure in participatory performances,
in which they’re smashed against gallery walls in Twomblyesque splatters. Ms.
Lucas seems to see the yellow splats as female ejaculations, noting that in
life, “men do that all the time with sperm.”

The New
Museum show includes a short video, “Egg Massage,” made with her partner, the artist Julian Simmons, with whom she lives in Suffolk, northeast of
London, and frequently collaborates. (They also have a London residence.) In it
Mr. Simmons lies naked on a kitchen table, while Ms. Lucas breaks eggs and
smears them over his body. A spontaneous event, it happened after dinner at the
house of Ms. Lucas’s close friend and longtime art dealer, Sadie Coles. (Her two dinner guests had a lot of eggs in their car: Christmas was
coming.) The New Museum show may have its own egg-splattered wall. “I’m quite a
domestic person,” Ms. Lucas told me.

She
described working for the New Museum show at her friend Matthew Barney’s studio in Long Island City, Queens, where she was readying one
of the exhibition’s two largest pieces: a 2003 Jaguar that had been cut
lengthwise, with one-half burned and the other collaged with cigarettes. (Its
title, “This Jaguar’s Going to Heaven,” rephrases the Pixies song title “This
Monkey’s Gone to Heaven” and also weaponizes it, since jaguars, one of the
world’s great predators, have probably dispatched plenty of monkeys.) The other
work will be an 11-foot-tall pair of over-the-knee platform boots in cast
concrete, redolent of sidewalks, streetwalkers, drag and great-man public
sculpture.

I’d met Ms.
Lucas in the early 1990s in New York, but hadn’t seen her, except in passing,
in 20 years. She seemed nearly unchanged: tall and thin, with slack brown hair
just above her shoulders, and a lean, no-frills yet delicate British face,
devoid of makeup, that she has called “plain.” As usual, she wore a shirt,
jeans and substantial, thick-soled shoes, an ensemble that might have been
determined by the age of 11 or 12 and barely altered since. This is the uniform
seen in her frequent self-portraits, and is by now as familiar as Joseph
Beuys’s vest and hat or Andy Warhol’s navy blazer and school tie.

Ms. Lucas’s
indifference to conventional comportment is, like her art, liberating. It’s a
tribute to her working-class roots while also signaling her interest in
androgyny and other kinds of ambiguity. She looks like what she is: an artist
always ready to work and completely at ease complicating gender and age
stereotypes, fusing man, woman, adolescent and child.

Born in
London, Ms. Lucas, 55, grew up on a council estate, one of four children. She
held part-time jobs from the age of 13 until she graduated from Goldsmiths College — where many of the initial Y.B.A.s met — in
1987.

A D.I.Y.
atmosphere prevailed at home: Her family “was always making things,” she said.
Ms. Lucas’s father, a milkman, could build cabinets. Her mother, who would
later oversee art programs in primary schools, had a plot in a community
garden, where she grew vegetables. She made clothes as well as toys, including
stuffed animals (Ms. Lucas’s introduction to fluff) and taught her daughter the
basics of gardening, sewing and cooking. Ms. Lucas was, in her own words, “a
shy, reserved kid” who read voraciously and seems to have gradually discovered
her own gregariousness.

“In my
early teens, I found my feet with it and learned to banter,” she said. “It was
a great joy.” The love of banter is reflected in her fondness for collaborating
with other artists and her preference for enlisting friends to help make work.
Yet one of the most resonant things she said during our talks was: “Making
things is company. Like reading or cooking.”

Massimiliano
Gioni, the New Museum’s artistic director, who organized the Lucas show with
Margot Norton, a curator at the museum, described Ms. Lucas as “very carefree
but, on the other hand, extremely precise.” He characterized as a “long
engagement” the dozen or so years when she continually rejected his invitation
for a retrospective. She had been included in “Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century,” the first exhibition in the
museum’s new home on the Bowery, in 2007. And in 2013, Mr. Gioni put her in “The Encyclopedic Palace,” the show he organized as
commissioner of the Venice Art Biennale, where she exhibited the first bronze
casts of the “NUD” pieces.

“In terms of freedom of materials, techniques
and attitude,” Mr. Gioni wrote in an email, he considers Ms. Lucas “quite
unparalleled and perhaps only on the same level as Isa Genzken for
pervasiveness of influence among younger artists.”

Among Ms.
Lucas’s consistently demanding efforts is one piece that had me, totally, at
hello. This was her 1994 masterpiece, “Au Naturel,” the source of the New
Museum show’s title. The work floored and exhilarated me in the 1999 “Sensation” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, one of the more controversial art
shows in history.

“Au Naturel” depicts, with brazen economy — or carefree
precision — a man and a woman in bed. For her: two grapefruits lodged within
the mattress (which is bent against the wall, forming its own headboard) and,
lower, a beat-up red fire bucket. For him: just two oranges flanking an upright
cucumber in line with the bucket.

It doesn’t
take long to get the joke: We’re seeing their primary sexual characteristics,
and they’re ready for action. You can apprehend the couple as clearly as you
might two figures in an early work by Edward Kienholz; they seem similarly
seedy, given the stained yellowish mattress. Nonetheless, the still life of
fruit and bucket remains equally present. As usual, Ms. Lucas makes every
texture, color and shape count; the ensemble put me in mind of the lightness
and delicacy of a painting by Watteau. The piece is caustic, yet joyful about
the persistence of desire and connection.

The main
arc of the New Museum show, on view through Jan. 20, is from early assemblages
like “Au Naturel” to the distinctive 2010 “Penetralia” series, made with Mr. Simmons,
which involves pieces of wood and rock found around their Suffolk house. My
favorite is “Tree Nob 2,” in which an expressively sculpted
white plaster phallus rises like a mushroom from a small chunk of wood. From
the Biennale, there are several plaster casts of the lower bodies of the artist
and nine girlfriends, which they made together. Lolling about on tables and
chairs, with cigarettes protruding from unlikely places, they resemble
impertinent secretaries or artists’ models relaxing for a moment, casting shade
on the male artists for whom they are posing. At least those are two
possibilities. In total, this trajectory shows an artist becoming much more of
a sculptor or form maker, veering between the found and invented in new ways
that imply that the avant-garde might still exist.

How will
Americans respond to all this? Ms. Lucas said she sees sex as a way to make her
art as accessible as possible while also getting to viewers’ most interior
feelings.

“I have a
lot of empathy for a lot of people,” she said, adding that she wanted her
audience — at the New Museum or anywhere — to “include people who might not go
into an art gallery.”

“I like
things to make sense to plebes like myself,” she observed.” I can’t take
that out of me.”